


Ask Me No Questions

by greenglowsgold



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Dean Winchester, F/M, PTSD, dub-con, show-level violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 16:32:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3775636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenglowsgold/pseuds/greenglowsgold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a string of deaths and missing person reports every few years in Detroit, but the city has never had a shortage of those, and a pattern does not a monster prove. Sam thinks there's a case here, Dean thinks there's something missing, and the girl at the diner thinks Dean is a soldier.</p>
<p>At least, when Dean's sharing a bed with someone else, it feels more normal to let himself sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ask Me No Questions

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the 2015 AceSPNMiniBang. Many thanks to those of you who put up with me talking about it so much more than writing it, and especially to [stephanie-likes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Stephanielikes/pseuds/Stephanielikes) and to my brother, who offered to beta and encourage on short notice. You rock!
> 
> I had the pleasure of being paired with the awesome artist [femmechester](http://femmechester.tumblr.com/) for this bang. Please, don't forget to check out the [gorgeous art](http://femmechester.tumblr.com/post/116780113932/for-greenglowsgolds-wonderful-aceminibang-fic-ask)!
> 
> On a story note, it didn't really fit into the warnings, but know that this story contains an asexual character who knows next to nothing about asexuality (and so does not refer to himself by this term), and who has internalized feelings of shame regarding both that and his same-sex romantic attractions.
> 
> This story takes place in early Season 8.

_They’re sitting in a bar, and the bartender is flirting with Dean a little bit._

_That’s not exactly unusual, since everybody’s always flirting with everybody at least a little bit. Well, not always, of course, and there’s a difference between a light hint and actually wanting to get somewhere, but for the most part? There’s always a little something going on, because people’s brains are just wired that way. Sam says Dean is constantly stuck in flirt mode, but really, he’s just responding in kind._

 

 

 

“Hey.” Sam snapped his fingers in front of Dean’s face, yanking his attention back from where Dean had been staring blankly toward the bar. “Pay attention.”

Dean shifted in his seat, shaking out the foot that kind of fell asleep while he’d been thinking about other things. “To what?” he grumbled.

Sam sighed. “Exactly. You haven’t said anything in ten minutes.”

Ten minutes? That sounded a little long for… shit, well, he was still working on the focus thing. “Uh, sorry.” He cleared his throat, straightened up more in his seat. “I’m listening.”

His new posture didn’t seem to impress Sam all that much. Sam sighed again, but it was less annoyed than the first time, more tired. “It’s pointless,” he said, and just as Dean was about to consider being offended, he continued. “We don’t have any idea what the hell it is. D’you want me to leave you here?”

It took Dean a moment to catch up with the sudden shift in topic, and even then, his response was a startlingly intelligent, “What?”

“You know.” Sam gestured widely toward the bar, encompassing the array of people seated there and, presumably, the idea of having sex with them. “We can’t really make a game plan without any information. We could just meet back up in the morning, go talk to the coroner, and go from there.”

Dean glanced back to the bartender, considered for a minute. The guy was skinny, or, more charitably, could be called lean — this place was a little nicer than the ones they usually went to, and apparently management didn’t feel the need to stack the deck with a bombshell babe behind the bar. He’d been making eyes at Dean all night; they were damn pretty eyes, too, to go with a damn nice face, and hands that’d been fiddling with the glasses in a suggestive way that he must have practiced.

He could sleep with this guy. Dude clearly wasn’t a virgin, clearly not so much love-em-and-leave-em as… well, as Dean, really. The sex would be good, he was sure, and Dean might even get breakfast out of the deal. Place like this, Sam would assume he went home with one of the brunettes circling her finger around the rim of a cosmo. Dean would get a couple of orgasms and a night in a warm bed.

He considered it. He thought of the effort it would take to go through the whole dance from start to finish — thought of the lies, and the sweet talk, and the mess to get to that end— weighed the pros and cons. Decided against it.

He was tired.

“Nah,” he said, tapping Sam’s bottle with his own before leaving it on the table and standing. “Let’s just head back; we’ll get an early start tomorrow. You settle the tab.”

He left Sam to deal with the bartender and headed outside, flipping his keys into his hand as he went. Car, motel, tv, bed. Good enough for him.

 

 

It was not a great night for sleeping. Dean stretched out every which way across the sizeable bed, but it was squishy and comfortable in a way that had grated since he spent a year with only the ground to rest on. He almost wished he had pulled his shit together and gone home with the bartender after all. At least, when he was sharing a bed with someone else, it felt more normal to let himself sleep.

Ah, well. Interviews today, and hopefully it wouldn’t lead to anything too exciting yet. Also, if not beds, he was at least on board with the caffeine-related benefits of regular society. They could swing by someplace and grab coffee on the way to the morgue. Ooh, and maybe bagels. With that thought in mind, Dean swung himself out of the useless bed and trundled toward the shower.

Sam was up and waiting by the time he walked back out. “You sure took your time in there.”

Shoving his way past Sam’s gigantic frame, Dean reached for his duffle. “Well, sure,” he grumbled. The warm shower had kick-started his mind a little, but he was still feeling foggy from the not-sleep. “Gotta make a good impression on the respectable citizens, right?”

“Sure.” Sam shook his head, smirking. “There better be hot water left.”

“There’s plenty. Wash behind your ears.”

Sam flipped him the bird as he disappeared around the door frame.

There was indeed more than enough hot water, as it happened, since Sam spent a solid 20 minutes in the shower and came out looking calm and ready for the day. Good. He could do most of the talking.

While Sam was washing his impossibly long hair, Dean had shoveled through his duffle bag for socks, grumbling when he ended up having to dump the whole thing out onto the bed just to find them buried at the bottom. He decided to leave it all where it lay, since it was only clothes and not anything that would have an unsuspecting maid calling the cops. Plus, it wasn’t like he was expecting to use the bed for much else anytime soon.

Sam glanced at the mess when he came out of the bathroom, but didn’t say anything. It might’ve been nice if he had, but whatever.

“So, morgue, huh?” Dean flipped through a few of the papers Sam had left on the table; they’d throw those in the car on the way out. “I thought the last death was more than a week ago, you think they’ll still have the body hanging around?”

Sam pursed his lips. “Yeah, it seemed weird to me too. I don’t think they ruled it a homicide, so, y’know. Maybe no one’s claimed the body? His boyfriend is missing and, I dunno, maybe he didn’t have family left.”

Right, the vanishing boyfriend. Also not down as a homicide, or a kidnapping, at least not as far as they could find in public reports. Just a lot of ‘missing’s and one ‘wanted for questioning’. There wasn’t much evidence of foul play, and in fact there was an incredible lack of weirdness to the whole case. It wouldn’t have even pinged their radar, if it wasn’t the latest in a string of similar cases dating back decades. Every few years, always a couple, and always in the Detroit area. One would turn up dead, one would vanish, and they’d never turn up with the second body.

“You’re sure this is our kinda thing?” Dean asked, definitely not for the first time. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Sam to find them monsters, it was just, well, the lines of their jurisdiction could be pretty blurry. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d showed up, guns blazing, to find a typically human culprit.

To his credit, Sam did not sigh. “Look, it’s not just about the deaths,” he said, as he’d said several times before, “it’s the _pattern_. They’re not all _exactly_ on the five-year mark, so maybe not a ritual, maybe something gets hungry, but it’s consistent enough to look into.”

“Right, and if we were in the single-Starbucks town of Nowhere, Ohio, that would mean a lot—”

“Dean—”

“—but this is Detroit, Sam. Have you seen the crime rates here? There’s bound to be some missing people that _look_ like a pattern.” Fuck, Dean thought, they were supposed to be done arguing about this. They were _here_ already, weren’t they? Because Dean had lost the last argument, in the car while they were crossing into Michigan. “We couldn’t even find anything weird about the bodies,” he finished tiredly.

“That’s the weird part.” Sam practically bounded over to the papers on the table, full of energy where Dean would rather lay down again for a few more hours, even if he wouldn’t get any sleep (see, this was why Sam won the arguments). “No marks, no poison, no symbols by the body, nothing that turns up in the reports. They’re all young, healthy people, and they just keel over all of a sudden, and the boyfriend, wife, _whoever_ goes missing, no sign of a struggle, never shows up again. I know shit happens, but this… It’s too clean.”

It wasn’t worth it. Hell, maybe they’d turn up at the morgue, check out the body, and hey, find a star-shaped burn on the back of the guy’s neck. It would be just like the universe to pull shit like that.

“Fine. Fine,” Dean repeated. “So we’re going.” Of course they were.

 

 

It wasn’t a short drive into the city, since they’d found a motel a little further out to save on costs. Taking the highway in along with every other schlub trying to make it to work on time was more than enough to remind Dean why small-town cases were the best. Even with all the time in traffic, Dean had only taken two bites of the bagel he’d insisted on stopping for by the time they made it to the hospital. He still hadn’t re-mastered the art of eating while driving. Oh, well. He tossed it into a trashcan on the way in, along with his empty coffee cup.

The trashcan looked fancier than it needed to. Everything did, really, as they walked through the hallways, flashing their badges at least six times before they managed to get anywhere in the vicinity of where they were headed. The walls were all pure white and shining; it was creeping Dean out a little, to be honest. Hospitals always did. It was too bright a place to be dead.

Dean had been expecting the usual, frustrated “why would the feds get involved?” attitude once they reached the morgue, but to his surprise, the doctor who greeted them actually smiled when she saw the badges. She looked _relieved_. Shit, Sam was gonna turn out to be totally right, wasn’t he? There had to be something super weird that the cops just weren’t making public.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, introducing herself as Dr. Holloway and leading them straight back to a chilly room full of metal drawers. Sam shot Dean a ‘seriously, what?’ look at her enthusiasm, equally baffled by the welcome they were getting.

Dean cleared his throat. “Why is that, exactly?”

Dr. Holloway scowled as she reached for one of the drawers, without checking a chart or even, Dean realized, asking them which body they wanted to see. “The police aren’t paying enough attention to this one. They saw the clean autopsy and washed their hands of it, but I keep _saying_ , there has to be more… Oh.” She paled slightly, hand hesitating on the drawer’s handle. “You are here to see Miles Scott, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Sam said, clearly making an effort to lower his eyebrows and adopt a more professional expression. Dean was busy doing the same. This was unexpected, but really, it only made things easier, so who were they to complain.

Dr. Holloway sighed. “Thank God. It just occurred to me that you could be coming by to check out a connection to a drug ring, or something. Not that that wouldn’t be a good use of your time, just… Anyway, here he is.” She pulled out the drawer, finally, revealing the same lumpy, worn sheet that covered bodies in every morgue across the country. “Miles Scott, came in about a week and a half ago.”

“Came in?”

“Brought in,” she corrected herself, glancing down at the sheet. “A neighbor found him in his bedroom; he’d probably been dead for a day or so, by then. They only went in to look for him because he didn’t show up for the carpool to work.” She frowned. “He worked in pediatrics, here.”

Sam’s face softened. “You knew him?”

“Barely. Our jobs don’t normally cross over, you know? Or when they do, it’s not a good time to make friends. But I knew his face, saw him around.” And then she flipped back the sheet neatly, so they could see his face, too. There was an efficient speed to her movements as she adjusted the fold and grabbed a chart from somewhere which made Dean raise his eyebrows.

There certainly wasn’t anything about the _body_ worth raising eyebrows over. It was a man in maybe his mid-thirties, with still features and dark skin paled slightly by his days lying on the slab, no obvious wounds and yet clearly dead, completely ordinary. At a glance, Dean might have guessed aneurysm. He looked closer, though, hoping to find something to support Sam’s interest, something to prove this wasn’t a waste of their time.

Nothing. The man was pale, but not unnaturally so, not like what would be caused by blood loss. No bags under his eyes, like he’d been exhausted, or stressed, or terrified in the days before his death. No weird marks or symbols that might have been written off as tattoos, and no regular tattoos, either. Eyes normal, when Dean lifted a lid to check.

The doctor said nothing about his examination, only handed him a glove and continued describing to Sam all the utterly normal details of the autopsy (that couldn’t be right, Dean thought; he was out of practice with the routine, but weren’t they supposed to care when investigators started randomly manhandling the bodies?). It absolutely was _not_ an aneurysm, Dr. Holloway told them. In fact, there was no internal bleeding whatsoever, no apparent organ damage, nothing beyond normal wear and tear, no trauma or wounds or signs of illness in the blood work.

“There are no signs of suffocation… Nothing,” Holloway repeated. She frowned down at her notes, looking more frustrated by the second. “I would say it’s suspiciously normal, but there _are_ anomalies. Little ones,” she hurried to amend, seeing them perk up. “Just the basic shifts from normal you would expect to find in any individual."

Sam nodded, inviting her to continue.

"Really, nothing surprising. White cell count’s a little up, for example, but apparently he was still getting over a cold. Not even his first of the season.” She chewed at her lip, flipping a page up. “Maybe I missed something…”

“I’m sure you haven’t,” Sam assured her quickly. “Your chart looks very comprehensive. Could we have a copy of that, actually? That’d really be helpful.”

“Oh, of course.” Holloway peeled her eyes away from the clipboard, taking an extra moment to reorient herself to the room. “I’ll just, I have to go print one off. Just a minute.” She took a step away, then stepped back, put the papers back in their place by the body, then moved off toward a door on one side of the room, through which Dean could see a small office when it was opened.

Dean reached for the chart as soon as she was gone; sure, she was giving them the print version, but if there was anything really weird here that she hadn’t mentioned, it might be scribbled into the margins, something she wanted to make note of but didn’t want in the official review. He noticed Sam took an extra moment to catch up with him, choosing instead to watch Holloway walk away. Well, good for him.

“The anomalies are marked in bold,” Sam said, when he’d finally cleared his throat and moved around the body to look at the papers with Dean. “When they’re far enough off from the average.”

“Yeah, I’m lookin’ at the bold, Sam, and there ain’t much bold.” He flipped through the pages. Shit, he didn’t even know the names of most of these things that were supposed to be significant, which probably meant they weren’t important. Nothing he’d seen before, anyway. The doc transcribed her notes over well, too. There were scribbles on the back sheets, too, but Dean noticed that most of those had been typed up and added to the most recent copies. Of course, they were things like ‘possible signs of deoxygenation in the nail beds?’ instead of helpful hints like ‘inexplicable levels of sulfur.’ Yeah, that would have made things easier. At least their version of the report would be up-to-date, not that it would help them much.

When he mentioned that out loud, Sam scowled and walked back over to his side of the body, lifting the guy’s hand like he was going to find something that Dean and a doctor who was apparently really into this case hadn’t found. Good luck to him.

Holloway came back in a moment later, shoving not one but two copies of the report at them, making up in papers what she lacked in patience. “I’m really, very glad your department is looking into this,” she said, raising one eyebrow like she’d be gladder if they went out looking _right now_. “Local forces have really dropped the ball on this one. I mean, I shouldn’t speak too harshly, some of the guys down there are very nice, but the way their resources are being _managed_ , I mean…”

“Why haven’t the police been looking into this?” Sam asked, finally. Dean wasn’t sure why it mattered; after all, it was pretty clear to _him_ that there wasn’t much going on, and even if they did manage to find some supernatural creep, he couldn’t blame the cops for not catching onto this one. All it meant was there was less local flavor to get in their way this time around.

Holloway clearly felt differently. She frowned at the mere mention of the police. “You know it’s his boyfriend who’s gone missing, right?”

“Ah.” Sam’s mouth snapped closed instantly.

“One of the sergeants told me he probably ran off because of domestic troubles. _Domestic troubles_ ,” she repeated, snorting at the phrase. “As if it was a coincidence he’d vanish the same day his boyfriend drops dead. I’m not saying it was his fault, from what I hear they were happy together, I’m just saying, a little investigation… a little effort…” She trailed off, chewing at her lip.

Sam nodded with every ounce of progressive understanding that a liberal-arts education could give him. Dean fought not to roll his eyes. Yeah, cops didn’t care about somebody’s case, big whoop. In this city, he was sure there was no shortage of crimes with actual evidence around to look into.

Meanwhile, here they were, the three of them casually crowded around some stiff like he was nothing more than a really lumpy coffee table.

“They’ve got a file, of course, but there’s not much to it,” Holloway was saying, and Dean realized Sam must have asked something else without him noticing. “I’m sure they’d be glad to have you take it off their hands.”

“We’ll be stopping at the precinct next.”

“Ask for Dobson, he was at the scene. Might have something to say.”

“Thanks, we’ll do that.” Sam smiled at her warmly. Dean couldn’t tell if it was meant to be reassuring or a come-on, but with Sam, there was always the chance of overlap. If Sam wasn’t telling Dean to take off, then Dean wasn’t gonna assume.

There was a pause, and Dean wasn’t sure which of them was supposed to fill it in. After a moment, Holloway took the opening instead.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy as hell you’re here; these two deserve the attention. But, I mean, it _is_ just one couple,” she said, though it was clear she didn’t believe the spirit of her words. “Was there anything else to do with this case?”

Clearing his throat, Sam took the opportunity as it was laid down in front of them like a bright red carpet welcome. “Actually, we’ve been tracking a couple of similar cases from past years, saw some repeating factors.”

Holloway’s eyebrows scrunched together. “You think this is serial?”

“No, no, we couldn’t say anything like that right now,” Sam said, carefully not discounting the possibility of such a thing in the future. “The FBI likes to look at patterns, is all.”

“How far back do the records go on that computer of yours?” Dean asked.

Glancing over her shoulder at the office, Holloway made a thoughtful noise. “Pretty far. We digitized a couple of years ago, gave a lot of interns a very boring job. Lucky for you guys, I guess.”

“Yeah, lucky us.” ‘Lucky’ would be getting out of this damn place. The fluorescent lights above them seemed to be getting brighter by the minute and it was starting to give him a headache. Was that weird, that the lights bugged him more than the body?

Holloway gave him a quick look, and Dean got the feeling that she’d noticed his earlier interest in examining the body and minded a little more than she’d let on. She was putting up with him because he’d promised action on the case. And because of Sam.

“Right, well. Let’s go take a look.” She turned to pull the sheet back up over the dead man’s head — goodbye, Mr. Scott — and pushed him back into the drawer. Frowning down at her hand as she shut the door, she flexed her fingers against the blue glove that covered it. “Should’ve taken these off earlier,” she muttered, and headed for a trash can in the corner of the room.

When the trash can opened, the smell of blood and shit and all the things that antiseptic scent tried so hard to hide rushed out, and Dean thought the release almost had a sound to go with it until he realized it was the snap of the doctor’s glove coming off, echoing hard against the metal walls and tables in the room. Dean jerked back before he could think not to, bouncing painfully off one of the handles for the little doors, and then planted his feet like it was the ground trying to throw him off-balance, not his own fucking nervous system.

“Dean.” Sam turned back around. He’d noticed the sound, the bang of Dean hitting the door (but not opening it, thank fuck, though the handle had bent in menacingly). His eyebrows rose slightly in question, but a moment later his expression shifted wildly, and he took two long steps right into Dean’s personal space, grabbing onto his wrist with an iron grip and whispering, “Dean, _what the **fuck**_?”

He looked serious, and a little panicked, and Dean had no fucking clue what that was all about until he followed the path of Sam’s grip down to his own hand and saw that his fingers had closed around the gun under his jacket. Huh. Well. That was…

“I’m fine,” he hissed, which was the absolute worst thing to say just then. Sam’s face hardened as he tugged Dean’s hand away from the weapon. Dean’s fingers uncurled reluctantly, shining white for a moment from how tightly they’d been clenched.

“Why don’t you go to the precinct right now?” Sam suggested, a little too tightly to actually be a suggestion. “Actually, you know what, just go get some lunch. I’ll meet you there when I’m finished, okay?” He said the last part louder, enough to be heard by Holloway, who was still hovering by the trash can and looking very confused.

Dean shook out his wrist with a glare. Sam raised an eyebrow that said, again, ‘okay?’ and ‘go on, even if it isn’t.’

“Fine,” Dean mumbled. “I’ll order you a fuckin’ fruit salad.” He cut his eyes over to Holloway. “Doc.” He nodded in parting, turning on his heel and striding quickly out. Sam would get that alone time with the chick after all. And Dean was hungry, anyway.

 

 

He was annoyed, but Dean wasn’t stupid. He left his gun in the car. Better safe then sorry, and there wasn’t likely to be anything in the neon-themed diner he spotted on a side road that deserved a bullet. Well, maybe the guy who designed the inside of the place. Seriously, this was way too much neon. How come these places always looked like a rainbow threw up on them?

Cas had asked the same thing, once. Only on him, it’d come out more like: Why would the owners of an establishment that depends on frequent patronage choose colors which pain their customers’ eyes? Sam had told him it was because they could only afford to hire a colorblind interior decorator, and then snickered while Castiel asked why there were so many of those when it would make more sense for them to choose another profession.

As his powers had dwindled and they got closer and closer to the apocalypse, Cas had complained about it more. Dean figured at first that it was just because they saw him more often for breakfast, but soon enough it was clear that, without the shield of angelic protection, the bright colors in the morning gave Cas a headache. They’d dipped pretty heavily into their stock of aspirin to get him through the early hours.

Purgatory, on the other hand, had been dark and dim and muted. Even the blood was rusty and dull instead of the bright red it should have been. Dean thought that might have had something to do with the fact that everything bleeding was dead.

Dean shook his head, wincing at the cheery ting of the bell placed above the door as he entered. Cas was probably dead now, too, so it didn’t really matter whether the place he was in happened to give him headaches. Maybe Dean would pop an aspirin or two in his honor; he sure felt like he could use it. He rubbed at his temple as he took a seat far from the door and that damn bell.

“What can I get’cha?” A waitress appeared at the table barely seconds after he sat down, when he clearly hadn’t had the time to do so much as locate the menu, much less look through it. She had a slightly pinched look on her face, like it was midway through the dinner rush instead of barely after eleven, and she looked just old enough and stern enough to call him “boy.”

“Water,” he grumbled, eager for her to leave and give him a minute to himself. “Just water.”

She turned away with a barely-audible huff, heading for the counter which was populated by a couple of guys on an early lunch break and a woman trying to placate her child with bits of limp-looking fruit from a bowl. Dean pulled a menu from the napkin stand on the inside of the booth, figuring he’d better be more prepared next time if he didn’t want to piss off the staff. Pancakes, he decided quickly, which were good any time of day but especially before noon.

With that settled, Dean leaned back against the cool, stained vinyl of the booth and surveyed the diner. He already had the exits down — that was one habit drilled into him by his dad that he was never going to drop — but another glance around revealed a series of retro ad signs for Coca-Cola on the walls, a chalkboard with today’s specials written in even brighter colors than the tables were, and a jukebox. It was one of the newer kinds, where you put in a couple bucks and picked three songs at a time from the touchscreen. There were probably Katy Perry songs on that thing.

Dean’s fingers twitched along the bench seat until he found a small hole in the material and started poking into the rip, playing with the stuffing within. Aside from the people at the counter, there were a few scattered groups of two or three at tables, but it wasn’t a big place and this clearly wasn’t a busy hour. The cooks that could be seen through the little window behind the counter were chatting good-naturedly while they worked instead of rushing around. There was only one other waitress beside the one who’d gone to get his water, talking to a couple on the other side of the room and noticeably younger than her co-worker, even though Dean only had a sliver of her face in view, mostly obscured by waves of hair.

Sighing, Dean tipped his head back against the seat, staring up at the frankly offensive ceiling (like, who cared enough about a ceiling to paint it _green_?) and wondering what Sam was up to. It couldn’t be taking them that long to go through the files, unless the computer wasn’t quite as up-to-date as Dr. Holloway had seemed to think, and in that case they’d probably have to give up soon enough anyway. Dean sincerely hoped they were spending some of that extra time getting into other activities in the office, or at least exchanging phone numbers.

Sam could use some of that action, the way he was moping around these days. Apparently, Sam was carrying around a lot of baggage lately, more than he’d ever picked up from any other period of time they’d spent apart, which felt so off that Dean was having a hard time grasping the concept. Didn’t seem like anything should be able to twist a guy up more than a literal vacation to _Hell_ —

“Shit,” he gasped, snapping his head up so fast it cracked something in his neck, to see the glass of water that’d landed so loudly on the table and the waitress who was suddenly much closer than she should have been. And, shit, it really was a damn good thing he’d left his gun in the car. Jesus, he was off today, needed more sleep; definitely should’ve gone home with that bartender.

A second glance told him the waitress wasn’t really that close (close enough that he could read ‘Peggy’ off her nametag, though), he was just surprised he hadn’t heard her coming, because he really should have. She actually looked sorry about it, too, clearly not having meant to startle him, but her expression soured once she caught the hand that hadn’t gone for his absent gun digging into the seat cover. He yanked it away guiltily, grabbing for the menu instead and clearing his throat.

It was lucky he didn’t want anything fancy, because she didn’t stick around to hear if he wanted whipped cream on top of the stack. Dean watched her walk off to the kitchen to put in the order, frowning. “That woman’s gonna spit in my food,” he muttered.

There was a bright laugh from a few feet away. Dean looked up to see the second waitress covering her smile with a hand that still held a pencil, black hair swinging down toward her face as she stifled another giggle. “Don’t worry,” she said, with a grin stretching her words. “I’ll keep an eye on her.” She tossed him a wink as she settled a tray under her arm and headed for the kitchen.

It took Dean a moment to realize he was smiling. It felt like exercising stiff muscles for the first time in weeks. Well, hey, it was always a boost to hear a stranger laugh at your joke, even if — especially if — it wasn’t that funny.

He busied himself with searching through the stack of jelly packets that were always piled up by the salt and pepper in diners like this. Some asshole had moved them all out of order, but all Dean needed was— ah, yeah, the blackberry kind, that was the best. Only one left, too. That was what happened when they weren’t in neat little sections so the servers could see when one flavor was about to run out.

The jelly packet turned over and over in his hands, a soothing motion. He stretched his spine, trying to dislodge whatever tension had him reaching for a weapon at the drop of a hat. Feeling on edge at the morgue was one thing, but here? This was his kinda place. Sure, he’d never been to this particular diner before, but these places had a kind of consistency that felt familiar no matter where in the lower 48 he happened to find himself on any given day. Which, he’d only been finding himself in that region at all for a couple months now, but this was one of the first things to come back. This: the neon colors and the cute waitresses and the blackberry jelly packets.

He was safe here.

Dean repeated that thought to himself a few more times while he waited for his food. He was glad when it finally came, despite the sour expression of the woman who left it, because he didn’t really think the mantra was helping. He took a knife and smeared the blackberry stuff all over the pancakes, adding some maple syrup for a combination of flavors that would’ve made Sam wince if he’d been here. But he wasn’t, so there, Dean was going to eat his meal without any whining on the subject. He picked up his fork, cut out a bite, stared at it for a second.

He’d been hungry when he’d ordered, he swore it. But he looked down at his food now and just… The idea of putting any of that in his mouth turned his stomach. Dean planted his elbows on the table and swiped a hand down his face. He was tired; his _bones_ felt stretched, skin too tight around his eyes. His stomach was empty and threatening to maintain that status by force, if necessary. Maybe Sam was right about the jelly/syrup combination.

Dean pushed his plate in toward the center of the table; the smell right under his nose was only making it worse. He might have sat there, staring at the pancakes and trying to convince himself they looked tasty, for a pathetically long time if the younger waitress from earlier had not appeared beside his table and balanced one hand against her hip, regarding him steadily.

“You’re looking pretty thoughtful, there.” She raised an eyebrow at the barely-touched plate. “I promise, she really didn’t do anything to it. I watched her.”

“No, yeah, I know.” Dean cleared his throat. “I mean, I believe you.”

“Really? That’s an awful lot of trust to place in someone you just met two minutes ago.”

“I…” Dean hesitated, mouth open, trying to decide if she was serious.

“I’m kidding,” she said finally, answering the question he didn’t ask. “Seriously, eat your food. My mom made me memorize that ‘starving kids in Africa speech’ when I was little; I could recite it for you if that’d help?”

Dean shook his head. “Nah. Thanks, uh,” he glanced at her name tag, “Bethany. Just not hungry.”

He expected her to ask why the hell he’d ordered a meal if he didn’t want to eat it, but instead she just looked thoughtful. “What kind of ‘not hungry?’ I mean, hangover, stomach flu, something like that?”

The most accurate answer would have been “none of your business,” but she seemed nice enough and probably wasn’t even fishing for tips, since this wasn’t her table. Then again, Dean wasn’t sure how to explain that he wasn’t hungry, hadn’t been hungry for a long while, and could’ve sworn he was hungry five minutes ago but now he was wondering if that was some weird waking dream. Or that he’d spent the better part of a year putting nothing in his mouth but a few sips of water and none of the food up here tasted as good as he remembered it. Yeah, maybe not.

“I’m tired,” was what he settled on. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

It didn’t seem like a useful answer, but her eyes — a very pretty, bright blue that most days would have had him turning up the dial on his charm — lit up when he gave it. “Oh, like _that_. Okay, I’ve got just the thing.” With that, she turned on her heel and whisked herself away.

Dean had absolutely no idea where this was going (or why), but he didn’t think it was going to lead to him getting those pancakes down his throat. Still, he didn’t exactly have anywhere else to be while he waited for Sam, and it would be kinda rude to just up and leave when Bethany clearly expected him to wait for her.

So he sat, twiddling his thumbs (or whatever people did when they said they were twiddling their thumbs, because nobody actually knew what the hell that meant) and trying to think of a supernatural baddie whose signature move was leaving no trace whatsoever. If there was such a thing, he thought, it was pretty clear why no one knew about it yet. He hadn’t come up with anything new by the time a plate landed in the empty space in front of him.

“What’s…”

“Toast and eggs, perfect breakfast food for the sleep-deprived man who’s been delaying his first meal of the day, and if you can’t identify it by looking at it, you’re further gone than I thought.” Bethany waved a hand at the plate of, yes, toast and eggs. “Eat.”

“You guys always just bring people food they didn’t ask for?” Dean asked grumpily, and probably unfairly, but Bethany didn’t seem bothered, just smiled back pleasantly.

“Nope!” she said. “Just for the stubborn ones. Anyway, the eggs are free; I told the cook it was for me.”

"Oh, uh..."

"Calm down, Robin Hood. I'm not gonna go hungry." She turned where she stood, sliding smoothly onto the bench opposite Dean. "I'm eating your pancakes."

Dean raised an eyebrow at the reference. "'Robin Hood'?"

Bethany winced, picking up a fork. "Yeah, I dunno, I'm not good at that. Terrible, actually. You should know that about me."

Despite himself, Dean felt the corners of his mouth twitching upward. "I should?"

"Yes. But." She pointed her fork at him. "You're asking far too many questions and eating far too little toast. So come on, mister. Keep up with me." She cut off a bite of pancake and brought it to her mouth, gesturing for him to do the same as she chewed.

He wasn't sure why — maybe it was Bethany sitting across from him and smiling around bites of pancake, or maybe toast and eggs really _was_ the ideal breakfast for someone who hadn't slept — but he found it easy to follow her lead. Before long, he was down one piece of toast and half the eggs, and his hands felt a little steadier than they had all day. Bethany shot down her meal in under five minutes, which Dean found somewhat impressive, and then stood up with a quick apology, saying she had to get back to work.

He was alone at the table after that, but he didn’t feel cut off, watching Bethany dance around the diner, taking notes and pouring coffee. This was his place, Dean reminded himself: sit on the squeaky seats, eat off the dull plates, listen to that one kid whine about dessert, flirt with the waitress to get a smile. Only, he hadn’t actually flirted, but she’d smiled anyway. By the time his phone rang, Dean was polishing off the last bite of eggs.

Sam was coming to meet him.

Dean hung up after he gave the name of the diner, and didn’t think until then to ask how Sam planned to get there without a car. Ah, well. Sam would figure it out. Dean fiddled around with one of those number games on his phone while he waited.

Sure enough, Sam walked through the door fifteen minutes later. Taking a seat across from Dean, he pushed the empty pancake plate aside and dropped a stack of papers on the table. Dean looked from them to his brothers face, focused on the stack. "That was fast."

"Good computer system," Sam mumbled to the files.

Dean huffed out a short breath. "No, I mean, you got here fast. Without a car." It sounded weird, now. Like he was accusing Sam of something.

"Oh." Sam made eye contact, finally. "Right, Dr. Holloway gave me a ride."

“Huh,” Dean said, running the times through his head. Only fifteen minutes from the call to Sam walking in, but a while before that for Dean to poke around with his food, to sit here and order, to drive aimlessly until he found the diner in the first place. That makes it a while that Sam spent alone with Dr. Holloway before she offered him a ride, to a guy she hardly knew, in the middle of the workday. “How much did you get?” he asked, but because he was not an asshole, he was actually talking about the files.

“A lot, actually. Their system goes back pretty far, sixty years or so before we got to stuff they hadn’t updated to electronic filing. I couldn’t find anything for sure before ‘65, but I think they were classifying a lot of cases as runaways, so.” Sam pulled a couple files out from the stack and handed them over to Dean, who had to move his plate aside quickly to keep from getting egg juice on the papers.

“Forty years seems like plenty to go on.”

“Yeah, except…” Sam’s brow furrowed, and he tapped the files he’d passed over. “There’s even less of a pattern than we thought. Look, these are from the nineties, just one year apart. A husband and wife, wife goes missing and husband turns up dead, and then this other couple, same deal, no evidence.”

“Might not be the same guy,” Dean said. “I mean, people do go missing.”

“Maybe.” Sam sighed. “I don’t know. That second couple, the girls were only together for a few months before it happened, weren’t even living together.”

“And it’s usually the happy-couple, fifth-anniversary-is-paper folks it goes for, so maybe not these two.” Dean put their file off to the side, face-down so the pictures wouldn’t stare at him: one woman blue-faced and prone, one smiling and bright and standing in for the empty space she’d vanished from.

“Fifth anniversary is wood,” Sam corrected absently.

Dean blinked. “Really? How’re you supposed to find something wood for an anniversary present?”

“I dunno.”

“Which one’s paper, then?”

“First.”

“Oh.”

Dean sunk back a little further into the bench seat. Why did it always feel like their conversations were a person short? Maybe it was all that time he spent being Dean-and-Benny or Dean-and-Benny-and-Castiel, with voices so distinct that they were now distinctly missing.

He cleared his throat. “So we headed back to the hotel? Look through all this?”

Shaking his head, Sam stacked up the files, tapping them against the table. “May as well stop by the police station while we’re out. Dr. Holloway gave that Dobson guy our names, said he’d talk to us.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “Wow, helpful.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty invested in the case. I told her I’d call and let her know how things were going, in a couple of days.”

“She gave you her number, huh?”

Sam shot him a weird look — totally unwarranted, Dean thought, since this wasn’t the first time or even the worst he’d commented on Sam’s love life — and shook his head. “There’s a picture on the desk in her office of her and her _girlfriend_ , Dean.”

“Oh.” Feeling the edges of heat creeping up his neck, Dean turned his gaze back down to the table. “Well, I didn’t see the office.” “Right.”

A moment. The kid at the counter banged his spoon against his plate three times before his mother grabbed it from him.

“Is she worried? Think we should keep an eye on her?”

Despite not being able to see it, Dean could tell Sam was shaking his head again, harder and a little more frustrated. “Probably not. The last couple got it a week ago, so it’s probably not going to try anything else for a… for a while.” And there it was, the closest Sam would come to admitting that this was a dead case, and their chances of finding anything were about a hair’s width away from zero.

“So, station?” Dean asked, flipping the file closed and pushing up off the bench.

“Yeah.” Sam stood up as well, and Dean realized then that he hadn’t eaten anything yet. But if Sam was hungry, he knew how to say it, and he wasn’t exactly searching around for a waitress.

Dean dropped some cash for the meal on the table before he left, enough to cover both plates just in case Bethany had been stretching the truth about how free that second meal was. She didn’t need to pay for a full plate just because Dean’s stomach was twitchy. Then again, if it was free, he was leaving a pretty decent tip that would go entirely to Peggy, and not the waitress who’d actually brought him something he could eat.

Bethany’s section was closer to the door, so on his way out, Dean dropped another five on a table that hadn’t been cleared of dirty plates, yet. He didn’t think Sam noticed.

 

 

Dobson was helpful — and happy enough to answer weird questions based on the excuse of ‘you never know what’s important’ — but not _that_ helpful. No cold spots, no weird smells, and no flickering lights gave them very little to go on, so they spent the next few hours in the motel eliminating possibilities.

‘No apparent signs’ could be a shtriga, but these weren’t kids, and they weren’t comatose. Could also be witches, but covens tended to do a lot more damage all at once, and there hadn’t been any signs at the scene.

Black Dog? No, they were way more violent.

Spirit? No, too mobile.

Dean’s eyes were starting to burn. “Maybe it _was_ witches,” he sighed, tossing a police report onto the puke-green bedcovers at his feet. “They’re always behind the nasty shit.”

“But there’s nothing nasty, here.” Sam was sprawled on a chair on the other side of the room so he could make use of the table, but it wasn’t quite big enough to contain the length of his limbs, so he stuck out into the space behind the door. “Dobson didn’t see anything at the scene; no herbs or blood or anything out of place. No dead flowers.”

“Sure, but it’s not like he’d be _looking_ for dead plants, right?” Dean reasoned. “He seems like a nice guy, but he’s not trained for this shit like we are.”

Sam rubbed hard at the corners of his eyes with a forefinger and thumb. “No, but he _is_ trained to check for signs of how long the occupants of a house have been gone. The boyfriend’s missing, remember? They would’ve checked for things like plants that haven’t been taken care of.”

Dean frowned. “Still…” There had to be something there, because if not, he didn’t know where the hell they were going with this. “Might go down to check it out tomorrow, just in case.”

“They canvassed the scene over a week ago. Probably cleaned up anything useful, especially if they’re not calling it a homicide and investigating,” Sam reminded him, but it wasn’t a ‘no.’

Right, that was the plan, then. Dean started sorting through the piles of reports on the bedspread, trying to find the one from the current case so he could bring it along tomorrow and compare with the scene.

“But maybe we should be looking at the missing person’s case, too,” Sam continued. “I mean, there’s nothing on the bodies — any of them, as far as I can tell. Could be the other half that’s important. I mean, maybe these guys are all getting possessed or something, killing their lovers. It’d explain how they all just vanish after.”

“Even with a demon in ‘em, they’d have to make some kinda mark if they were killing people.” Dean shrugged. “But sure, couldn’t hurt. It’d be good to at least find out if these guys are turning up bodies eventually.”

“Right.” Sam was running his fingers back over the reports, looking thoughtful. “There’s no record of ever finding the missing people, but if the thing kept them, you know, those few years between attacks, they might’ve come up as a John Doe with no one around to identify them.”

It was as worth looking into as anything else. “There was a coffee shop half a block down from the station; they probably have wi-fi. Could drop you off there tomorrow, and you could walk down to the station if you needed more from them.”

“Sounds good.” Sam stood up, stretching nearly to the ceiling, and tossed a file onto the end of Dean’s bed. That was the one he needed, finally.

Dean was too immersed in flipping through it to notice that Sam had spoken again. He looked up, blinked. “What?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “I said: You wanna go out? We cut it kinda short last night.”

“Uh…” Dean squinted, blinked, tried to focus closer on Sam’s face. There was something there; Sam was expecting something from him. A ‘yes,’ probably, but why…?

Oh. Wait. Dean did some quick mental math, counting back the days to the last time he’d “gone out” and hadn’t come back until morning. It had been a while, he realized. He’d done it a lot at the beginning, when he’d first gotten back, but then sleeping had started to come easier, maybe not every night but often enough to work, and it’d been at least a month. It didn’t feel like so long when he wasn’t thinking about it, but Sam must have noticed, if he was resorting to pointed hints and reminders.

If he wanted Sam to back off, he should probably just go for it, he should just say yes.

Instead, he said, “You ever wonder what the big deal is with that shit?”

It threw Sam for a loop, that was for sure. On the other hand, he was probably going to be even more concerned, now, as soon as he was done processing.

“I mean, just, the bars and the clubs and everything,” Dean added quickly, not sure whether this was going to make it better or worse. “The whole… routine.” And then after that, he thought, but had the presence of mind not to say out loud. He didn’t talk about this; he _never_ talked about this.

Sam was frowning. “Are you okay?” he asked, ducking lower to catch Dean’s eye. “I mean, really. Are you okay?”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Dean said, because that was the thing he’d meant to say in the first place. “Just thinking, you know, how many assholes with teeth tend to turn up in bars. ‘S like hunting grounds.”

“So you think… we should check them out?” Sam tried doubtfully.

“Well, not right now.” Dean swung his legs to the side and pushed himself off the bed, needing to move. “I’m just thinking, people go missing from bars all the time, and it’s hard to track movements through the whole nightlife scene. All those missing people that never turned up?”

It was a weak link, an idea on a moment’s notice that Dean was tossing out into the open air, but Sam shrugged. “Sure, might be something.” It wasn’t.

Dean coughed, using the motion of covering his mouth as an excuse to turn toward the bathroom. “Think I’ll turn in, anyway.”

“Sure, Dean.”

Sam had been looking at Dean weird for weeks now, so it wasn’t exactly unusual to feel eyes on the back of his neck as he went into the bathroom. Every time he said something funny, every time he moved in a way Sam wasn’t used to, he got one of those looks. It was Purgatory; it’d fucked up their whole dynamic.

And if Sam ever stopped staring and really asked, that was what Dean was going to blame this on, too.

 

 

There were tears on his cheeks and the phantom grip of a hand in his own when he woke up. He breathed hard for several seconds, turned to press his face into the pillow and rubbed once or twice to dry it without acknowledging the wetness with his fingers. It wasn’t ideal, he thought, when he was back to staring up at the dark ceiling and measuring his breaths, but at least the fact that he’d woken up meant that he’d been sleeping before that, which was an improvement over the night before.

Even so, _God_ , he was tired of this shit.

His mind kept sliding back, falling into the feeling of fingers slipping through his own, of blue eyes— The waitress, he thought forcefully. Think of the waitress. Bethany. She had blue eyes. Pretty, too. It was a nice thought.

Trying his best to remember as many details about those eyes as he could, and doing a better job of it than he would have thought, Dean slipped softly into sleep once again.

 

 

The drive into the city the next morning went quicker than last time, or maybe it just felt like it because Dean didn’t have to keep sipping coffee to keep himself alert and on the road. He dropped Sam off at the cafe, and they did a weird little dance of ‘when should I meet you?’ for about five minutes, until a girl came over to ask if they were actually going to take this table or not and Sam finally sat down and said he’d call later.

Then, of course, Dean ended up driving halfway back out of the city, because it turned out Miles Scott had lived in that sort of almost-suburban area that people liked to raise kids in. So really, they should’ve just stopped there on the way in, checked it out, and Dean should’ve found something else useful to look into while Sam did his computer thing. Christ, they used to be so much better at this. The last time they’d started working together again after a year apart, that had felt off too, but then it had turned out that Sam didn’t have a soul. There was no such excuse this time around; they had all their pieces.

Or hell, maybe they didn’t. Maybe this time it was Dean who’d let some all-important part of himself slip right out without noticing. Maybe when Cas’ hand had slid from his grip at the portal, it’d kept something for itself. That would make sense, that he left something behind.

He slammed the car door a little too hard, on that thought, then winced, half expecting some neighbor to come storming out at the noise, demanding to know what he was doing poking around this house that clearly wasn’t his. Double-checking that his badge was tucked into his pants pocket, just in case of nosy neighbors, Dean ducked around to the back of the house and jimmied open the lock.

Sam was right, he realized immediately upon entering the house. The cops _would_ have noticed if the plants around here had died. Because there’s about twenty goddamn million of them.

The vegetable garden in the backyard had been big enough that he’d noticed it, but that had been outside. The kitchen held rows of little pots by each window, sprouting herbs in various states of distress now that they’d been untended for over a week. Dean felt an odd urge to water them.

Well, one of these dudes had definitely had a green thumb, Dean decided. There was a shelf of cookbooks above the microwave, too, so he was probably one of those people who needed everything to be freshly picked 30 seconds ago when he made dinner. There were other signs of life and personality as Dean walked through the living room: a pillow on the couch that had been cross-stitched, probably by hand, and a collection of snow-globes with landmarks from around the country. Kitschy as hell, compared to the pillow. Dean wondered if the two of them had ever argued about things like that. Then he shook his head and went upstairs.

Okay, so Miles had been found in his bedroom. Unsurprisingly, the room was neat and undisturbed, though Dean couldn’t be sure if that was because it had been that way to start with or if someone had come in to clean up after the police were gone. More likely the former, since the guy’s body was still sitting unclaimed in the morgue. No family left, or just none who’d bothered to show?

Dean spent an uneventful half an hour combing every inch of the room for traces of sulfur or a hexbag. Even a weird coin or something, because hey, it’d come up before. In the end, though, he left empty-handed, having to admit that the police had been thorough in their search. Or, the other obvious answer, there had never been anything to find.

Dead ends and dull reports, that was all there was here. In a way, Dean understood the weirdness of it; even a scene devoid of witches and monsters should have a human culprit skulking around somewhere. But on the other hand, no clues meant they had nothing at all to go on, so was it really worth agonizing over what could have happened?

Sometimes people just died. Shit happened, right? And you couldn’t always figure out why. They even had a name for that, when it was babies. Sudden Infant Death Whatever, the words doctors pulled out when they’d run out of options, because grieving parents needed to call it _something_. When it happened to adults, it was called ‘Natural Causes,’ or a ‘Freak Accident.’ It was all just code for “the universe is out to get you, sorry.”

But Sam would want to bang out a few more hours paying lip service to the idea that they could explain everything if they just looked deep enough, so Dean would have to let him be. He could occupy himself for a little while.

 

 

“Well, look who’s back!”

He didn’t know she’d be here, Dean told himself. He’d come for the food.

Yeah, well. He really did want food, though.

“Guess so,” he said, hovering by the door while he tried to work out how the diner split its sections. “I’m a little less high-maintenance today, I promise.”

“I wouldn’t have minded.” She inclined her head to point him toward a table near the door to the kitchen. Properly directed, he sat down with a lack of hesitation that sent Bethany into a full-faced smile as she slid a menu in his direction. “I like the idea that you’re getting more sleep, though. Makes me feel all inspiring, or something like that.”

“Glad to help with that, Bethany.”

She made a face, then. “Ugh, no, ignore the name tag,” she said, half-covering it with one hand. It was, for the record, kind of hard to ignore, no matter what she said, considering it was neon pink and handwritten with a kind of lightning bolt squiggle instead of a dot over the ‘i’. “Just ‘Beth,’ seriously, names should only have one syllable. Speaking of which…”

“Dean,” he offered, before it could occur to him to lie. “Short for nothing, I promise. But what would you have done if I’d said ‘Howard’?”

Beth shrugged. “Backtracked horribly and gotten really embarrassed, probably. I don’t know a one-syllable nickname for ‘Howard.’”

“Guess we got lucky, then.”

“Very.” She grinned.

It took an extra minute for Dean to remember the menu in front of him. “Right, uh. So, I’m gonna try for the pancakes again.”

“Are you sure? ‘Cause that didn’t work out so well for you, last time.”

“I think it went alright.”

She assured him that it had, in fact, gone horribly, and he must be remembering it wrong, but put in his order for pancakes anyway, and even dropped a couple extra packets of blackberry jelly onto his table as she walked by on her way to bringing a family an extra spoon to replace the one their kid kept dropping. This time around, Dean ate his meal on the first try, no poking or prodding needed. He wondered if it was like sleeping, easier when someone else was around to coax him through it. Beth looked unquestionably pleased when she found his plate empty.

“I feel like I should tell you,” she said, piling up the plate and mug on top of a small stack already in her arms and focusing entirely on the dishware, “that my shift ends at four.”

“You do, yeah?”

Beth nodded. “Yep. Just, you know. To put that out into the universe.”

Plates balanced precariously on one arm, she headed for the kitchen.

 

 

Since Dean had spent a grand total of two days in Detroit, and most of that time had been spent in the police station or the morgue, he was happy to let Beth lead the direction of the date. He himself had barely found the movie theater where he’d killed most of the afternoon — starting with the latest Marvel movie, but the explosions had started to get on his nerves and he’d snuck into the next theater over for a comedy instead. He shot Sam a text halfway through, but his brother replied he was nowhere near done going through records (apparently having hooked up with Doc Holloway again to ask around the hospital for information on the couple) which Dean considered equivalent to a blessing to stay out late.

Beth informed him that she knew the city better than the back of her own hand, and the best thing to do on a day like this, not too cold outside but well into the fall season, was to take a walk through the park just a few blocks from her favorite restaurant. She sounded so enthusiastic, describing the colors of all the different kinds of changing leaves in one place and clearly seeing it in her head, that Dean would have found it hard to say no, even if he’d wanted to. And it did, he had to admit once they got there, look pretty cool. The bursts of color, bright and wild and so much more natural than neon paint in a diner (or stark white of a hospital, or the gray he’d lived with for months upon months), was more comforting than he would have thought.

“I used to come here with my dad,” Beth said, pulling his eyes off the trees and back to the person beside him. He should be paying her more attention, he thought, but she didn’t seem to mind that he kept glancing back to the leaves. “He knew all the names of the trees. He kept trying to make me learn, but I’ve always been bad at memorization, you know? Don’t have the kind of brain.”

“Couple of ‘em are easy, right? Oak, elm, willow.” Dean ticked off names on his fingers.

“Oh, sure, you know the names, but that doesn’t mean you know what the trees are. Point me out an oak, there, mister.”

Ah, busted. He knew some of the smaller plants, the basic-wilderness-skills plants, like what was poison ivy and what wasn’t, which berries he could eat, that sort of thing. But trees? He pointed to one at random, off a ways from the path.

Beth squinted at it, then sighed. “You know, I don’t even know if you’re right. But I’m still calling bullshit.”

“Fair enough,” he chuckled. “So, how many years did it take before your dad gave you up for a lost cause?”

“He would’ve kept trying, I’m sure,” Beth said, with a fond smile. “He was that kind of guy. He’s been gone for a while, though.”

“Shit, sorry.”

She waved him off. “Nah, it’s okay.” She kept her eyes fixed on the trees, though. “Like I said, it’s been years. And, just to get it out of the way, my mom’s gone, too. In the sense that I never actually knew her.”

“Ah.” Dean wasn’t sure what to do with all that. It was a lot, and a little sooner than most girls liked to get into the whole dead parent thing. Well, if they were talking about it. “My parents aren’t around, either.”

Nodding, Beth led him around a left turn on a split in the path. If she didn’t want to say anything about it at all, that was fine by Dean, they could just skip right past it for now. He tensed when she opened her mouth, but her next words weren’t exactly on topic. “If we’re getting the heavy stuff out now, d’you mind if I ask, well, you’re in law enforcement now, right?” She cleared her throat guiltily when he glanced at her. “I mean, I heard you and your partner talking about an investigation, is all.”

Well, they hadn’t really tried to keep quiet about it. “Yeah. FBI.” May as well keep up the same story, though it bugged him a little to lie about it. Probably because she’d just told him something so personal about her dad.

“FBI, wow. Alright, impressive, I didn’t expect that. But before that, you were in the military for a while, right?”

Dean wasn’t sure how to respond to that. A sharp ‘no’ hovered just on the tip of his tongue, because the military implied a hell of a lot of noble endeavor that he had no claim to, but he’d never managed to work out any other long-term explanation for his familiarity with guns that didn’t make him sound like he’d grown up in a cult. Put on the spot suddenly, he struggled to find a reasonable answer.

“Sorry,” Beth said quickly, before he could think of something to say. “I didn’t mean to bring it up if you don’t want to talk about it. I just— I know the look, I dated this guy a few years ago just back from overseas, and you have the…” She gestured vaguely to his person, and apparently to the “look,” whatever that meant. He couldn’t tell what she was talking about, wasn’t sure how to refute it. “Anyway, like I said, we don’t have to talk about it. I was just gonna ask how long you’d been back.”

And then, for whatever reason, it was easier to say, “Not long.” It was a quarter-truth, at best, and something squirmed in his belly again at the lie, but he’d only known this girl for two days, he couldn’t get into the details.

“Okay. So, hey, which one of these is your favorite color?” she asked, switching topics so fast it took him a moment to catch up. “I mean, you’ve practically got a full swatch right above you.”

He was mumbling something about a shade of yellow when she took his hand.

 

 

If he’d worried at all about what was implied when a girl mentioned her ‘favorite restaurant,’ then he shouldn’t have. There was none of the snooty attitude or too-dim lighting he might have feared if he’d stopped to think about it (some of those places, you couldn’t even _see_ your date), and in fact, it looked like a family place. There was a group a couple tables over from them with two kids under five.

It was one of those American-Italian mixed menus, so Dean could order pasta with sausage without feeling like a pretentious asshole, because the names of the dishes were listed in English. Beth scored further points by ordering ravioli instead of a salad, and munching on the bread and olive oil dip that had been left on the table while they waited.

She talked, too, about the sights he just _had_ to see before he left Detroit, and the way the seasons changed here. It was nicer than Dean had expected.

Not that he’d expected it to be _not_ nice. It was just… peaceful, that was the word. Maybe it was because they’d started in the park instead of at dinner, or the casual way Beth kept up an actual conversation rather than letting it slip into small talk or silences that could only be filled by light touches beneath the table. Actually, she’d hardly touched him at all since she’d held his hand as they’d walked, but she still smiled at him enough that he knew he hadn’t done anything terribly wrong.

It felt more like enjoying the date itself, rather than hurtling toward the expected end.

“Hey, you lost?” she said, snapping his attention back to her.

“Sorry,” he said automatically, noticing that their food had come while he hadn’t been paying attention, which he hoped meant he’d been looking at her instead of just staring off into space.

“So, you’re based where, then? For work?”

Oh, okay, he hadn’t actually missed that much. He remembered this, the talking about work. “Uh, we move around a lot.” That was too vague for a real answer, though. “But mostly D.C.” That’d work; weren’t most FBI agents from Washington?

“Ah,” she said, instead of reacting to the fact that he’d just told her he wouldn’t be sticking around for long. She picked up her fork, giving him a moment to do the same, and cut a ravioli in half to get something bite-sized. She hummed happily around the pasta when it entered her mouth. “Yep, definitely still my favorite place.”

“Isn’t that a kind of betrayal, if your favorite place isn’t where you work?”

Beth shot him a look. “Try your own food and then tell me that.” He did, and she was right, it was pretty awesome. “Anyway, it’s not that I hate where I work. The cooks aren’t bad, it’s just that it’s all been made on the same range as everything else and most of the sauces come from a can and, well.” She gestured to their plates. “You can just taste that this is _fresh_ , you know? The ingredients make a big difference, no matter how good you are at mixing them.”

Alright, Dean could respect that. It might have sounded picky, but he’d seen her eat pancakes at the diner and not pull faces, so she could definitely be flexible.

“So you’re an East Coast person,” she said. “What’s that like? Because the closest body of water for me has always been a lake, and I hear the ocean’s different.”

“I don’t really spend much time on the beach,” he admitted, and then, “Didn’t grow up on the coast, anyway.”

“Yeah? So, where?”

“Kansas.” Close enough. Most of his answers were ‘close enough.’

Her nose scrunched up a little as she absorbed his answer, looking deeper in thought than he would have expected from something like that. “You know, I’ve been trying to place your accent this whole time.”

“I have an accent?” he said, raising an eyebrow. Sure, okay, an American accent, if you wanted to get technical, but it wasn’t like he had a Southern drawl or anything really localized.

“Everyone has an accent,” Beth told him, with just enough authority in her voice that she’d probably taken a couple of courses in college, or something like that. “Sometimes it’s just a few words here and there, or the way you pronounce a certain vowel. Things like that. Yours is kind of… all over.”

“Moved around when I was younger.” He shrugged. She didn’t mention that he’d just said he grew up in Kansas.

“Moved around when you were young, moving around now…” She shook her head, smiling as she stabbed a bite of food with her fork. “Do you ever stand still?”

The answer was unquestionably ‘no,’ but he found he didn’t want to give it. So he stuffed a bite of pasta into his mouth and let her rapid topic changes take care of it.

 

 

“This is me,” Beth said, nodding at the door that was set apart from the others by the little bronze owl knocker that her landlord probably didn’t know about. The thing looked like it was pasted on instead of nailed in, which might be better, but still. It was one of those little townhouse apartments, the ones where they didn’t like you changing things, but Dean was glad she had, anyway. It gave him something to stare at.

He’d offered to drop her off, because he’d known he should, but now that he was here, he found that he didn’t want to be. Well, _here_ , right here on the doorstep, that was fine; it was inside that he was concerned about, when he got invited in and offered a drink and shown the bedroom, even though it wasn’t really that late. The rest of it, everything before now, had been nice, and he’d just… liked _that_ part.

But Beth was leaning in close, and he closed his eyes… and opened them again, when he felt a kiss land on his cheek instead of his lips. She settled back onto her heels, smiling up at him softly. “I’m working again tomorrow, “she said. “You should stop by.” And then she squeezed his hand once, turned to the door, and let herself inside, and he was left on the step, looking at the owl on the door.

Huh, he thought, after a moment. That was different.

When his phone rang, Dean had to fight down a smile so he didn’t sound weird when he answered it. Luckily, what Sam had to say was distracting enough to gather up any and all stray bits of focus in an instant.

“Dean, the missing guy, you’ll never believe this, I _found_ him.”

 

 

“What do you mean, it’s not him?”

The look on Sam’s face probably meant that it was time to stop asking that question, but it was really hard to give a shit when he was still working on what the hell was going on, here.

“I mean, _it’s not him_ , Dean. It’s a different guy.” Sam shook his head jerkily. He was probably grinding his teeth in a really unattractive way, but Dean was keeping enough distance that he couldn’t tell.

“But you said—”

“Well, I was wrong.”

“And you were _sure_ —”

“It looked just like him, okay?” Sam said, cutting him off again. “I know, I know, the scars are different, the dental records, this guy has a birthmark… But that wasn’t in the photos, you’ve seen them, they look like _twins_.”

That, Dean would give him. He’d been on board, too, when he’d seen the picture Sam had found, paired with reports of an accident an hour outside Detroit involving a public transport bus and a truck. Over a dozen injured, and two dead, including the guy who’d be a dead ringer for their missing person if he hadn’t been identified as a C. J. Harrison, born and raised in Toledo, Ohio and happily married — until yesterday’s crash.

Dean sighed. “Alright, look, this is a dead end. This guy’s IDed, definitely an accident… There’s nothing here.” And he'd cut off a date to come down and check it out, as he'd informed Sam. Okay, not really, but close enough.

“I know, I know, just. Jeez, look at them.” Sam was staring at the pictures again. “They’re like twins, but they’re not related. It’s like a copy.” It was a bit eerie, two guys who probably hadn’t even known each other with nearly identical faces, and such bad luck between the two of them.

“Hell of a coincidence,” Dean said, in an agreeing tone.

Sam sighed. “Yeah,” he said, so smoothly that Dean was taken aback by his sudden compliance. “Look, you were right, okay? There’s nothing here. I mean, in Detroit.”

“Okay,” Dean said slowly, unsure how to deal with Sam now that he was applying reasonable doubt to the scenario.

“I mean, if I’m jumping at shadows like this, that probably means there’s nothing _real_ to jump at, right?”

“Sure, yeah.” Casual agreement seemed to be going over best.

“I’m sorry I dragged you here.” Sam glanced up at him, then, looking startlingly like he _meant_ it, when, honestly…

“It’s not a big deal, Sam.” Dean shrugged, uncomfortable with the weight of Sam’s apology. “Looked like something it wasn’t, ‘s all. You’re smart, you know what a pattern usually means. I should’ve seen it, too.”

Sam gave him a wry smile. “Except you were right, and there’s nothing to see.” He shook his head, then pushed himself away from the wall and clapped Dean on the shoulder. “C’mon, then. I heard about a werewolf in Montana. An actual werewolf, not just a pattern, this time. We can head out in the morning.”

Oh, right. Caught up in the novelty of Sam admitting he’d been mistaken, Dean had forgotten that it meant they had to _leave_.

 

 

Sleep must have decided to come and go in patterns, because Dean found himself lying awake long after Sam had turned in, staring up at a ceiling that he’d already memorized the first night they stayed in the room. His thoughts were going in circles, because apparently, now that Sam had finally admitted defeat on this case, he’d decided to become obsessed.

Nothing was technically out of place. Weird as hell, sure, but not in a really unnatural way. One guy died, another went missing. A third guy who looked an awful lot like the missing one turned up in an accident, which was a massive sort of coincidence, but not unexplainable. Dean had read those stories on the internet of people who looked like twins finding each other from opposite ends of the globe; it happened. You could only fit so much variety into 7 billion people. Something ticked at the back of his mind, though, waiting to be noticed. So he shifted around under the too-warm covers, and his eyes stayed open.

Maybe it was something else; maybe he just didn’t want to leave. He had no love for Detroit, no more than anyplace else he’d been in the last couple of months, but there were things here that he could say he might miss. Big cities had a range of food options that no small town could ever boast, for one, which had been nice enough to check out for one night, even if he was more than content with greasy diners and quick breakfasts, most of the time.

They should stop by the diner, tomorrow, he thought, even if they were on their way out, even if it made no sense to go back into the city before leaving. Just to show up and say goodbye, because otherwise Beth was probably going to think he’d given up on her because she hadn’t wanted to sleep with him, when really, it was…

Dean paused, rewound. There was something there, something in the greasy diner food, no, before that. The better food, the stuff that wasn’t from a can. _You can just taste that this is fresh, you know? The ingredients make a big difference._

He shot up in bed. Something was _there_ , just a half step off from clicking, what was it, what was he trying to remember? Something Sam had said? _The dental records_ , he talked about, but that wasn’t it. _It’s like a copy_. Yes, there. A copy, and something else. The twenty million plants.

There.

Oh, God.

He need to wake Sam up, needed to get his shit together and decide what to do like a logical, rational person.

He didn’t do any of that. He grabbed his keys and left, and he didn’t even notice if Sam woke up in time to yell at him as he pulled out of the parking lot.

 

 

When he stumbled out of the car, parking only half-legally near the corner, he found that same bronze owl with too-big eyes, and thought, _this can’t be real_.

But Bethany looked just the same as always when she opened the door, warm and welcoming and smiling just a little when she saw him, like she was surprised he was there but happy nonetheless, even though it was late enough to be early, dawn only a couple hours away. For a moment, the urge was so strong to reach right into his head and pull out the pieces that’d come together, to drop the gun that he had no guarantee would make so much as a dent, anyway. If he opened his arms, he knew she would come into them.

“It’s you,” he said, before any of those other impulses could win out.

Bethany didn’t run or shout or lunge for him or even try to knock the gun out of his hand. She sighed, tilted her head to gesture him closer. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon. Come inside, I’ll make tea.”

 

 

“I’m going to be honest with you,” she said, rubbing one finger against the side of her mug, “because you won’t want to stay if I lie.”

He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to stay _now_. It was stupid, an amount of stupid he hadn’t been aware he was capable of, but he sat on the couch and felt, well, not completely at ease, but not like he wanted to jump off and leave, either. Could it just be how much he wanted to like Beth? How normal she was acting? Or maybe something else.

“You dosed me,” he accused, staring distrustfully at the mug of tea in front of him that he’d at least had the sense not to touch, yet. But even without that, he’d eaten food that she could’ve gotten to on three separate occasions, so she wasn’t lacking for opportunity.

Beth just shook her head. “I didn’t.”

“And you expect me to just—”

“I told you I wasn’t going to lie,” she said smoothly. “It’s your choice whether to believe me or not, but my answers won’t change just because you ask a second time. I’m telling you the truth.”

God help him, he wanted to believe her.

So he tried something different. “What are you?”

“I think you would call me a siren, though there’s some crossover with term ‘incubus’ as well. My dad called us something different, but you wouldn’t know that name.

“I saw you yesterday morning, when you and your partner stopped for coffee,” she continued, moving right past the confession like she’d just told him she was Canadian, or a pediatrician, not something that wasn’t human. “I didn’t look like this, yet, but there was a woman who did, just passing through, and you gave her a second look. She reminded you of someone.

“You’ll have to understand,” Beth said, and words that should have been stern came out softer, instead. Comforting. “Normally, I wouldn’t choose a face just for you. I’d find one I like, and then I’d find someone else who liked it, too. That’s how it works, most of the time. But you walked in, and so did she, and I think I liked you both.”

“You met me at the diner,” Dean choked out, getting hung up on the timeline, of all things.

“I’d already been there for a week. It was a burner job, and a face I wasn’t going to keep. Just trying to meet people, you know? After I saw you, I just went back in and told them the girl who’d been there had a family emergency and I was her roommate, and offered to cover. Places like that, they really aren’t picky. I’d meant to find you somewhere else, but then you just… came in. Like fate.” She smiled at him then, as brightly as she ever had.

Holy shit, Dean realized, she might really think she was telling the truth.

“It’s a funny thing, to fall in love.”

“Didn’t the last guy you loved die just a couple of weeks ago?” Dean said sharply. And she would have killed him, he reminded himself.

“You think I didn’t really love him.”

He swallowed. “Well, you seem to be moving on pretty damn fast.”

“It isn’t the first time I’ve lost someone. Of course I care, but it doesn’t help to linger. And now I have you.”

Dean wanted to protest that, to say that she didn’t _have_ him, but. There he was, sitting on her couch, holding the cup of tea she’d made him, even if he wasn’t drinking it.

“All those people,” he whispered, staring down at the tea. It should have been dark and translucent, but it was creamy instead, shot through with milk. He still didn’t feel sure there wasn’t anything more in it. “The ones who died, and their partners went missing. You were all the missing ones.” She would’ve had to disappear, every time, and the next time someone saw her she would have a new face.

“Well, I don’t know how many you have in mind. If you showed me pictures, I could tell you which ones, but who really wants to know about their girlfriend’s ex-lovers? Sometimes hunters get overly thorough, you know, pull out things that have nothing to do with anything. Yes, I know you’re a hunter,” she said, at his startled look. “I think that’s going to help.”

He should have been asking a thousand more questions, but the one that he got out was, “Help with what?”

Now, she looked serious, turning to face him dead-on and lowering her half-empty mug to give him her full attention. “With having you survive.”

 

 

He listened to her talk, let it lull him into the kind of peace he’d felt at the restaurant just a few hours ago, even though she wasn’t talking about sights and families and work, anymore. She was talking about lovers who’d died because of _her_ , because she was still trying to figure out how to live with someone without draining them down to nothing.

It was what she lived on, she explained: a kind of energy that came from intimacy. It was safer, maybe, to take it only once from any given person, and then move along to the next, and the next and the next and the next, “But who wants that?” she said, shaking her head at the very idea. No, she wanted something different, wanted the kind of stability and love that came when you woke up to the same person beside you for years on end.

No one had been able to give her that, not for more than a few years at a time, and some even less than that, because they weren’t built to give her what she needed in the long-term. “But you are different,” she told him, firm, like she could make it true just by saying it. “You know what I am, know what you’d be giving. That would help, I know it. You could tell me if it was becoming too much, if you needed a break. Or we could figure out a spell to strengthen you. We’d have options.” She lit up at the thought of the possibility. “We could be in love for _decades_.”

Dean's heart gave a funny sort of flutter at that, but there was a basic problem with her idea. Well, the whole thing was a very specific kind of clusterfuck, but it seemed marginally less crazy than he thought it would have coming from anyone else. Still, there was something he couldn’t get past.

“You’re talking about sex,” he said, and the last thing he expected her to do was shake her head.

“I’m not.” She wrinkled her nose, just like she had when she’d been trying to figure out where his accent was from. “I don’t— Well, suffice it to say, there are different schools of thought. I prefer less sexual intimacy. It’s perhaps a bit trickier to figure out the energy transfer, but once I had it, well. That was decades ago.”

Dean wondered whether he should be more surprised that she was so much other than she looked, or that she hadn’t had sex for longer than he’d been alive. The second one, he decided. Could she really not want…?

“You still trap people, though,” he said, and it sounded desperate even to him. It shouldn’t. She’d _killed_ people. There was a body lying in the morgue right this minute, because she’d loved him. “You drug them and make them love you back. I’ve seen sirens’ work before.”

“I’ve already told you I didn’t give you anything,” she said steadily. “And I don’t make a habit of tricking people into loving me, either. Sometimes, near the beginning, a hint or two to speed up the process, but nothing more. Miles hadn’t needed it in years.” She looked down, then, at her hands clutched around the mug. It was empty, now. Dean’s was still untouched.

She smiled when her eyes followed his. “I really didn’t put anything in the tea. But if you’d like…” She paused, then offered slowly, “I could give you something now.”

_No_ , Dean growled, and pushed up from the couch, only a moment passed and nothing changed in her expression, and he realized he hadn’t actually done that. He’d thought to, but he hadn’t, because part of him was considering it.

He was insane.

She’d given him something already; she was lying.

Why wasn’t he _moving_?

“I understand that it’s hard,” she said, laying a hand tentatively on his arm, then pressing down a bit harder when he didn’t jerk away. “You feel like you shouldn’t want this. It would just make it easier for you to accept it, that’s all.”

Why would he do this, Dean thought, and then, what would he lose?

He was, what, a 33-year-old hunter driving around the country looking for things to stab, dragging his brother who didn’t want to be there along with him. He was going to die sooner or later, especially now that he didn’t have an angel to help him out when he got in trouble. With Beth, he’d have four, five years, looking at the average? That was probably his life expectancy, anyway.

And what she wanted, he found he didn’t hate. He liked her, and she liked him, and neither of them liked… well, alright, if it was just in his own head, he could say that neither of them liked _sex_. But he’d still have someone to sleep next to at night.

“Okay,” said a voice that he realized a second later was his. And then again, “Okay.”

She smiled. “It feels just like falling in love.”

There was a noise, coming from somewhere unimportant compared to the way Beth was leaning in carefully, brushing her fingers against his neck, her nose against his cheek, and finally, her lips against his.

He didn’t feel any different. Even when she pulled back to look at him, he didn’t feel any different. Warmer, maybe. And when he looked at her, he thought she might be a bit more beautiful than the last time he checked, and he wanted to stay with her, but that was nothing new.

He’d expected… Well, he didn’t know. Something pulling at him, maybe, or fuzzing his mind over until he couldn’t think straight, or maybe, no matter what she’d said, some tug deep down in his gut like he’d never felt before. Or something like the last time he’d met a siren, a burning need to _hurt_ whoever he had to as long as it meant this one person was safe. But, none of that.

It was peaceful. He found he didn’t care about the banging noises that lay somewhere on the edge of his senses, and Beth didn’t care either. She asked how he felt, and he could only nod, and lean in for another kiss. Her lips were soft and warm.

The unnatural peace lasted just until Sam broke the door down.

 

 

"Get the hell away from him!"

Sam was right beside them before Dean could finish processing his presence, because the layout of the townhouse had the living room right off the main entrance and because Sam could cross absurd lengths in a single stride. He grabbed Dean's shoulder and pulled him back hard, instantly creating five feet of space between him and Beth.

"Hey!" Dean protested, but Sam's attention was already gone, focused on Beth.

"I know what you are," he said, and Dean's eyes shot to Sam before realizing that he only had a gun, no bronze daggers to be found. "I heard you."

Beth regarded him steadily. "I love him."

It sent a brief flutter to Dean's chest, same as it had before. It was easier to focus on it now, though, since he was more relaxed.

"No, you don't," Sam said, and raised the gun.

If he’d thought about it, Dean might not have moved. Unless it was loaded with very specific bullets, the gun couldn’t do much damage to Beth. On the other hand, it could hurt him or Sam a hell of a lot. Still, a jolt of panic made Dean jump up and grab Sam from behind, throwing off his aim. The shot went through the ceiling.

Sam yelled and went down, gun spinning across the floor and under a cabinet. Dean let it lie there, taking a step back to stand near Beth, and felt calm once again. He didn’t want Sam hurt; he just wanted him to leave.

Unfortunately, Sam didn’t agree with him. He scrambled back up to his feet, glaring at them to back down. “Dean,” he said stiffly. “We need to leave.”

“No, I think _you_ need to leave,” Beth said, sounding angry for the first time that night. “Who are you to tell him what to do with his life?”

“I’m his brother,” Sam hissed, and a flicker of surprise flashed across Beth’s face.

“Sam. Leave.”

Sam had clearly been about to add something more, but he stopped at hearing Dean speak for the first time, turning to him with his mouth hanging open. Something about it was disquieting, made Dean want to squirm where he stood, but Beth laid a gentle hand on his shoulder and he knew he was right.

“All the times you could’ve helped and you didn’t bother? This ain’t one of those times. Why can’t you just _leave me be_?”

He’d barely finished his sentence when Sam dived for him, something Dean should have seen coming, if he’d been paying enough attention. He tried to duck out of the way, made it only halfway and ended up at an awkward angle with one of Sam’s arms around him from behind, trying to move him somewhere. Then, suddenly, the weight was gone, and he looked up to see Sam landing hard against the doorway, groaning at the blow.

Dean straightened hastily, taking a step to the side so he was in front of Beth and facing her. Sam was alright, he was still moving, but this needed to stop. “Let’s just go,” he said, curling his hands around her arms.

Her eyes softened as she looked at him, and she raised a hand to his cheek. “Alright,” she sighed. “Out the back.” Then her eyes widened, and Dean’s world went a little fuzzy as he tipped sideways, but he thought he heard her scream, “No!” and maybe one other thing, it sounded kind of like his name.

He was on the floor, then. He heard a thud, and someone else was, too, and then Sam was leaning over him so he was the only one _not_ on the floor, and Sam had hit him. Sam cut him, too, because there was a flash of pain on his arm and a mumbled apology that didn’t mean anything right now, not when he didn’t know what was going on.

Someone was screaming.

Shooting to his feet faster than his vision could come back left bright red spots dancing in front of his eyes, and when he blinked them away, not all of the color vanished. He stumbled, then, the force that had pushed him upright leaving him as fast as it had come.

Beth was dead.

Sam was breathing hard, staring from the body to Dean and back, waiting for something to happen. Dean waited, too, for something to change, for him to feel something. But the body didn’t shift into some formless horror, and he didn’t feel anything but sick, staring a dead woman bleeding onto her own carpet, with several inches of bronze buried in her chest. He looked closer, because he couldn’t see a hilt and the pattern looked familiar, and his heart jolted. The owl. It was the knocker on the front door, which now had a patch of paint stripped off, instead. That was…

“Lucky,” Sam muttered, and then, “Dean.”

Awful, Dean had been thinking, instead. Why had she put it there? Or had it belonged to whoever had lived there before two weeks ago, and she hadn’t thought to move it? He stared at it, and waited for the warmth to seep out of him, for his body to go steadily cold. When he stumbled again, Sam caught him, and Dean couldn’t decide whether to move away. All that peace was leaving him.

He still loved her.

 

 

At a gas station in Illinois, Sam tried to string more than three words together while speaking to Dean. The attempt went like this: “Do you want me to grab you a water?” When Dean only shrugged, and didn’t reply, Sam pulled his leg back into the car, shut the door, and tried again.

“Look, I know—”

Dean tensed, and Sam seemed to notice, because he paused, but Dean didn’t want him to stop. He wanted to know what Sam knew, what he’d overheard, what Dean would have to find an explanation for, now.

“I know you miss… him,” Sam finished, finally. “But you don’t—”

Dean jerked open the door and stepped outside. “I’ll pay,” he said over his shoulder, before he slammed the door shut. He knew it looked like he was running. Let Sam think that was the only secret he’d kept.

Let him think Dean regretted kissing Beth because she messed with his head, not because he just wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t. If Sam had come bursting in and tried to use Dean’s blood as a poison before she’d given him anything that night. Maybe she still would have died, but he would have seen that and known she’d lied to him. Now he never would.

He should stop thinking about it, stop wondering if it would have worked out. She probably hadn’t told the truth, just what she’d thought he would like to hear. But whether she’d been making a genuine offer or not, he knew he’d never hear it again. A hot girl who wanted him? Sure. A kiss? Easy enough.

But that? That ‘I want what you want, all the good stuff and no rolling around between the sheets’ stuff? That was fairytale bullshit. Twisted fairytale, sure, but they all kinda sucked once you got past the Disney versions and down to the originals, and he was never gonna find anything like that again. He was sure of it.

 

 

_They’re at a gas station, and the attendant is flirting with Dean a little bit._

_And Dean’s flirting back, because if he’s nice enough, she might toss him a wink and forget to charge him for the bottles of water he’d set on the counter when he came up to pay the bill. Because that’s how this whole thing works, really._


End file.
